Summary:
Upverter was the first trip we had after returning from New York. Located inside a residence house, this start-up company was full of surprises and smarts. Upverter is a company that have built CAD software, which had simplified the process of creating printed circuit boards. Our tour guide Michael Woodworth and Adam Gravitis, gave us excellent insight into the company’s purpose and showed us small demos of their product. They had started the company by making a prototype and joining an accelerator in states. They claimed all the software out there that performed similar tasks are out-dated and terrible to use. Then they lead on explaining that companies creating complex circuits spend thousands of dollars behind hiring engineers that can create these circuits. Also there is almost 0% chance that the circuits these engineers create will function in the first time. It takes couple of revisions for the circuit to function properly. Which can be financially taxing. Their software doesn’t guarantee the circuits will function in the first go, but it provides feedback for errors to make the process of circuit design more user friendly. The software also had a real time collaboration feature; so multiple people can work on one design at the same time. It was like the Google Docs of circuit design. They had said that no other company has ever done that. They had put a lot of thought into User Interface design and were constantly improving it.
Reflection:
The thing that stood out to me the most was the dedication these people had towards their job. It was very inspiring. They had basically invented a solution for a problem they were personally having as hardware engineers. They looked highly frustrated with the software that existed out there and developed a way to fix that, which seemed really cool. Despite having amazing software I thought they lacked a little in terms of marketing. If they involved their selves more in maker community and promoted to people that are starting to learn circuit design, they might have more success. Because new learners don’t have biases towards different software.
Questions:
- You are up against big competitions, and established software that people use already. So how is your business model adjusted that you can take people out of their comfort zone of using that software and guide them to use yours?
- Have you created simple projects and tried to promote them within the maker community using something like Instructables, to get people to use the software more or to familiarize them with it?
- What are some plans you have to advance this project in future? What sort of tools and projects you have in mind that will enhance this tool?